Introduction

Patriot Memory, or Patriot as shall be referred to henceforth in this review, was founded in 1985 and is thus one of the most established brands in the PC DIY sector, with over three decades of experience in manufacturing and selling flash memory modules, storage drivers, and mobile memory cards. But they decided they wanted a piece of the ever-growing PC gaming peripherals market and dipped head first into it to where they now offer a full set of peripherals - keyboards, mice, and headsets alike - under their Viper gaming brand. Today, we take a look at their flagship keyboard offering, and thanks to Patriot for providing the review sample.


The Viper V770 is a full size, and more, mechanical keyboard with RGB backlighting everywhere, and I do mean everywhere - the wrist rest has RGB lighting too! It would be easy to dismiss this immediately as yet another 2017 RGB gaming keyboard at first glance, but there are some neat features here I have not seen elsewhere, and as a whole, I do not think any other keyboard has so many discrete buttons/toggles/wheels as an ANSI layout "standard" mechanical keyboard either. Oh, did I mention there is a lightweight program to help control the keyboard as well?

Specifications

Packaging and Accessories

Patriot ships the Viper V770 in a large 51 x 20 x 7.2 cm box that weighs over 2 kg, so you already know something substantial is inside. There is a plastic sleeve around the packaging itself to keep it free of dust, and removing it, we get a better look at the box. Patriot has adopted a black and red color scheme here, with a printed image of the keyboard and some of the keyboard's salient features on the front. On the back and sides, we see this continue with yet more images, including that of the switch being used and product specs joining in. There is a seal on either end to keep the contents inside in place.


There is another box inside what we now know was merely an outer sleeve, this one being completely red in color and having a flap in the center to keep it closed. There is a cutout to take a look at the keyboard inside, which coincides with a similar cutout on the outer sleeve as well. This helps with getting a feel for the switches, but the thick plastic cover over the keyboard does not provide the true feeling, so it feels like a poor implementation of a nice concept instead. Open the box and we see a piece of soft foam on top, which also has that very cutout, and this helps protect the keyboard immediately underneath. The keyboard is further protected on the sides and bottom by shaped, cut foam pieces, making for excellent packaging overall. As seen in the pictures above, the accessories themselves are found under the keyboard.


There are three sets of accessories that come with the Viper V770 - a wrist rest in a soft foam sleeve, an orange envelope, and a plastic pouch. The envelope houses some stickers as well as a quick start guide, and the pouch has an orange (where is this orange color suddenly coming from?) ring-style keycap puller as well as an audio adapter to use a single combination microphone and headphone jack with two separate ones. Presumably, the keyboard has audio pass-through with separate microphone and headphone jacks that can be used with this adapter accordingly, and we will confirm whether such is the case soon enough.


The wrist rest is interesting already given we know there is RGB lighting in here, and in order to do so, Patriot has gone with a black, soft rubber finish with a translucent line that spans the length of the wrist rest and a translucent outline of the Viper brand logo, which of course consists of a viper snake's head with a forked tongue. Turning it over, we see six large rubber pads that will help keep the wrist rest and the keyboard, once attached, in place on your desk; the wrist rest also uses five pins in the middle, at the top, to connect to the keyboard electrically. No means of a hook-up mechanism also suggests magnets on both the wrist rest and the keyboard's body, so this is another thing we will check for on the next page.